Located in the highlands of Santa Cruz, El Chato is a private tortoise reserve that is home to hundreds of Galapagos giant tortoises. Because the reserve is located between the Baltra airport and Puerto Ayora, many people stop here on the way to or from the airport. Our original 2020 itinerary had us staying on Santa Cruz at the beginning of our trip so we were planning to stop after our arrival from Quito. But when we rescheduled because of the pandemic, we flipped our itinerary and stayed on Isabela first so we ended up visiting El Chato on our last day on our way to the airport for our flight home.
After checking out from our hotel in Puerto Ayora, our driver from book-ec picked us up and we made the roughly 25 minute trip to the reserve. Our driver waited near the car with our bags and told us to meet him back there in about 45 minutes. We headed to the restaurant to pay the $5 fee and get a brief overview of the grounds from an employee.
In addition to the trails that offer tortoise-viewing opportunities, the ranch also has several lava tunnels that you can explore. We headed to those first but got to see a tortoise on the path along the way.
The lava tubes are areas where lava once flowed underground and then cooled and hardened, leaving behind huge underground tunnels. Stairs led down into the cool, dark tunnels and then back out the other side. The longer ones had lighting in them so you could see where you were going. We had peeked into some lava tunnels in Los Humedales on Isabela, and we thought it was neat to actually get to walk through these ones. It took less than 10 minutes to walk through all of them and was an interesting and worthwhile part of our visit.
After emerging from the last tunnel, we made our way around the trails. The trails are a series of several loops and you have to do some backtracking to cover all of them. We got a little turned around but it was fine because everything eventually led back to the start.
We first came to a large pond, where there were 10 tortoises cooling themselves off in the water and mud.
From there we continued around a few of the loops, spotting tortoises near the path and out in the fields. There were also lots of birds around, and we saw quite a few cattle egrets hanging around the grazing tortoises. We even saw one trying to catch a ride (albeit a very slow one) on the back of a giant tortoise. (Unfortunately we were too far away for my zoom to catch it and he flew off when we got closer.)
We finished up exploring the ranch and headed back to the main building, where they had 5 different tortoise shells on display. They even let you crawl inside for a photo op!
We met back with our driver and continued our journey to the airport, making one last stop at Los Gemelos. But we had one final encounter with a tortoise on our way out. As we headed back to the main road, we were stopped by a huge tortoise walking down the center of the road. We had to wait patiently until he made his way to the side of the road but a moped coming from the other direction was able to skirt by along the side of it. With the beautiful backdrop of the tree canopy, this is one of my favorite pictures from our trip.
Overall El Chato is a worthwhile stop, although I think we would have enjoyed it more at the beginning of our trip. I think the excitement of seeing so many tortoises in one spot would have been huge coming straight from the airport on our arrival in the Galapagos. But by this point in our trip we were tired and knew we had a long travel day ahead of us, and we had already seen many tortoises in the wild on Isabela and at the Charles Darwin Research Station in Puerto Ayora. I would definitely front-load this experience during your stay in the Galapagos if you can in order to get the maximum wow-factor out of it. It is definitely a great chance to see a lot of tortoises in the wild and to explore the highlands of Santa Cruz a bit.
